Within the Great Hall of the San Diego Convention Center, thousands of companies set up booths and pavilions to sell collectibles and to promote their franchises. A key part of that marketing is the release of limited-edition collectible toys and prints, a practice of huge companies such as Hasbro Inc. or Mattel on down to independent artists.

But it's not only fans who pick up these items. Scattered among 125,000 who attend the convention daily is a network of dealers who arrange to buy or pick up as many of the items as they can in preparation for resale to the wider market, often for double, triple, or as much as quintuple the original price. They become a small part of what
Reuters said in 2008
was a $4 billion memorabilia market.

Some Comic-Con dealers will sit on the goods for a year or more; others will upload pictures, execute the sale and ship the item all on the same day.

"It's for people who can't get to the Con," said Jay Canonizado, a Rancho Penasquitos biotech trainer who runs several booths at Comic-Con.

On Friday, Canonizado picked up 10 copies of a limited-edition print of an artist's interpretation of Batman from a nearby booth for $50 each. He shot a photo of one and put it on eBay. He tracked bidding from his laptop at his booth, and made the sale around noon of that same day for $195.

Canonizado prefers to deal in limited-edition prints and items he can pick up without having to wait in long lines, as is common for toys.

This year, Hasbro put strict limits on how many of their limited-edition G.I. Joe, Marvel and My Little Pony toys they would put on sale. That meant the only way to get them was to get online extremely early in the morning.

Beverly and John Cadion and a family friend, Brian Cummings, rose at 4 a.m. Friday to queue up for the 4-foot-long helicarrier ---- a kind of flying aircraft carrier ---- and other toys that would be available.

But that line wasn't to make a purchase; it was to get a ticket with a time on it for when individual customers could wait in another line to buy the toys themselves at Hasbro's booth in the Great Hall.

"We don't call it Comic-Con; we call it 'Line-Con,'" Cummings said.

Rather than make a quick dollar on the items they collect, the Cadions sit on their merchandise for a year or more, and then bring it back to Comic-Con at a higher markup. At one Comic-Con, they said, they picked up a Lego version of the AT-AT Walker from "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" for $50. They sold it a year later for $450. The Cadions say they have revenue between $15,000 and $20,000, and a profit between $12,000 and $15,000 for the four days. They make slightly less at Wonder-Con, a similar event usually held in San Francisco. The rest of the time they have day jobs.